WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.500 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. 2 00:00:01.600 --> 00:00:07.720 Welcome to the continuation of the second Festival of Ideas 3 00:00:07.720 --> 00:00:11.080 in the City of Enlightenment, Adelaide. 4 00:00:12.220 --> 00:00:18.120 I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Ghana people, 5 00:00:19.920 --> 00:00:25.360 the custodians of the land that we are using. 6 00:00:26.540 --> 00:00:29.140 A question of reciprocity. 7 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:34.400 With the Ghana people is the question that stands in front of us in the next century. 8 00:00:36.160 --> 00:00:41.480 The levels of creativity and depth of courage and response 9 00:00:41.480 --> 00:00:43.920 to making sure that that reciprocity 10 00:00:46.380 --> 00:00:50.580 permits another generation to live on this land in a different kind of equilibrium. 11 00:00:52.500 --> 00:00:55.720 We're continuing one of the sub-themes of this festival 12 00:00:55.720 --> 00:00:59.600 on intoxication and addiction. 13 00:01:00.280 --> 00:01:03.380 Drugs, of course, are constantly presented in the mass media 14 00:01:03.380 --> 00:01:07.680 as the drug problem, the drug war. 15 00:01:09.200 --> 00:01:12.800 But actually, it's a drug culture. 16 00:01:14.200 --> 00:01:16.920 And could we please talk about culture? 17 00:01:17.800 --> 00:01:21.440 Could we understand that intoxicants are a culture, 18 00:01:21.640 --> 00:01:26.640 they're part of culture, and you cannot intervene or deal with them in any way, 19 00:01:27.880 --> 00:01:29.740 or in fact even engage them, 20 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:33.580 until you've recognized how a culture works, 21 00:01:33.700 --> 00:01:34.680 what a culture is about, 22 00:01:34.860 --> 00:01:38.020 and the kind of life that a culture has to offer. 23 00:01:39.020 --> 00:01:40.840 The nature of drug culture, 24 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:46.240 its incredible range and scope through so many societies, 25 00:01:47.580 --> 00:01:51.000 is just beginning to be acknowledged 26 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:54.460 and may be finding its way into the popular press. 27 00:01:54.720 --> 00:01:58.360 As we recognize we have a lot to learn from the planet we live on, 28 00:01:58.360 --> 00:02:04.120 from the properties of the plants that are on this earth, 29 00:02:05.480 --> 00:02:09.380 from the chemical compounds in our own being 30 00:02:09.380 --> 00:02:11.860 that we're only partially understanding. 31 00:02:13.500 --> 00:02:21.780 One of the most extraordinary cultural historians and thinkers 32 00:02:21.780 --> 00:02:23.440 of this generation 33 00:02:23.440 --> 00:02:27.840 is the very beautiful and wonderful Sadie Plant. 34 00:02:28.360 --> 00:02:30.200 Who has returned to Adelaide. 35 00:02:30.960 --> 00:02:36.740 Her work is path-breaking, generous, exuberant, inquisitive, 36 00:02:37.680 --> 00:02:39.920 and completely personally engaged. 37 00:02:40.460 --> 00:02:44.040 Which is about a new generation of scholarship, 38 00:02:44.240 --> 00:02:46.060 which is less about judgment 39 00:02:46.060 --> 00:02:49.380 than about total engagement 40 00:02:49.380 --> 00:02:52.520 and willingness to transform oneself 41 00:02:52.520 --> 00:02:55.180 in the process of learning. 42 00:02:55.960 --> 00:02:58.200 In fact, hoping for that. 43 00:02:58.360 --> 00:03:03.960 And that transformation, which is the beauty of Sadie's writing. 44 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:07.480 It's a huge pleasure to have her with us today, 45 00:03:07.700 --> 00:03:12.140 to speak with us about drug as culture. 46 00:03:12.940 --> 00:03:13.700 Thank you. 47 00:03:21.280 --> 00:03:24.260 Well, thank you very much to Peter for that introduction. 48 00:03:24.400 --> 00:03:27.240 His introductions are always a hard act to follow, I think. 49 00:03:27.300 --> 00:03:28.340 But I will do my best to do them. 50 00:03:28.360 --> 00:03:28.680 I'll do my best. 51 00:03:29.100 --> 00:03:30.720 Thank you all very much for coming. 52 00:03:30.840 --> 00:03:32.540 And thanks to all the people of the city 53 00:03:32.540 --> 00:03:35.020 and especially to the organizers of this event 54 00:03:35.020 --> 00:03:37.460 for making it possible for me to be here. 55 00:03:37.560 --> 00:03:39.040 It's a real great pleasure for me. 56 00:03:41.080 --> 00:03:44.860 I first started thinking about the drugs question 57 00:03:44.860 --> 00:03:50.260 in an attempt, I suppose, initially to point out what to my mind 58 00:03:50.260 --> 00:03:52.040 and I'm sure probably a lot of people here 59 00:03:52.040 --> 00:03:54.940 after the last couple of days are now also thinking this. 60 00:03:55.180 --> 00:03:57.840 To point out some of the hypocrisies, 61 00:03:57.840 --> 00:04:02.060 the absurdities at work in the so-called war on drugs that we've lived with 62 00:04:02.060 --> 00:04:04.600 really for the last hundred years or so. 63 00:04:04.900 --> 00:04:09.920 And also to try and get away from what are often the very judgmental attitudes 64 00:04:09.920 --> 00:04:15.360 and especially the judgmental starting points with which often the whole debate begins 65 00:04:15.360 --> 00:04:19.700 and I think have often skewed it so much that it's become almost impossible 66 00:04:20.300 --> 00:04:24.480 to have a frank, intelligent, open discussion about this subject. 67 00:04:24.480 --> 00:04:28.860 And it's greatly to the credit of this festival that it's provided so many opportunities 68 00:04:28.860 --> 00:04:32.300 for this kind of conversation to begin to happen. 69 00:04:33.520 --> 00:04:38.520 It almost seems that the drugs question has attracted over the years 70 00:04:38.520 --> 00:04:48.420 so much disinformation, delusion, absurdity, fantasy, paranoia, over-excitement, over-reaction. 71 00:04:48.520 --> 00:04:52.660 It almost seems as though many of the effects of psychoactive substances 72 00:04:52.660 --> 00:04:54.460 on the individual human being, 73 00:04:54.480 --> 00:04:57.960 the human brain are actually mirrored in the effects that the subject has 74 00:04:57.960 --> 00:05:02.820 in the broader society with the exception of course of the pleasures that come from it. 75 00:05:03.700 --> 00:05:06.120 And although that may seem a flippant point, 76 00:05:06.220 --> 00:05:10.040 it is a bigger point that I'd like to keep returning to this afternoon 77 00:05:11.200 --> 00:05:17.140 because it certainly seems that in many ways we can see the effects that these substances have 78 00:05:17.140 --> 00:05:21.720 on the individual users mirrored in the broader social response to them. 79 00:05:21.900 --> 00:05:24.040 And certainly it seems that as a culture, 80 00:05:24.480 --> 00:05:29.420 we have become really addicted to the whole tangle of problems surrounding drugs. 81 00:05:29.840 --> 00:05:32.580 The war on drugs itself, as you will have heard, 82 00:05:32.680 --> 00:05:35.080 those of you who've been listening to Alfred McCoy, 83 00:05:35.120 --> 00:05:38.180 has become a kind of bizarre self-perpetuating system. 84 00:05:38.880 --> 00:05:41.760 And after a hundred years or so of prohibition, 85 00:05:41.780 --> 00:05:43.960 it's really become part of the cultural furniture 86 00:05:43.960 --> 00:05:47.380 and very difficult to displace as a consequence. 87 00:05:48.560 --> 00:05:52.600 And it seems in many ways that the same patterns seem to repeat themselves 88 00:05:52.600 --> 00:05:54.460 at every level of society. 89 00:05:54.460 --> 00:05:55.560 And I think that's a very important point. 90 00:05:55.560 --> 00:05:57.840 And the culture in which these substances intervene. 91 00:05:58.180 --> 00:06:00.040 So amongst other things today, 92 00:06:00.120 --> 00:06:03.660 I'd like to suggest that the ways in which drugs work 93 00:06:03.660 --> 00:06:06.860 at the level of the individual body and the individual mind 94 00:06:06.860 --> 00:06:11.320 have many lessons for the ways in which they work in the larger social world. 95 00:06:11.500 --> 00:06:13.960 It seems as though their effects on individuals 96 00:06:13.960 --> 00:06:17.100 tend to reproduce themselves on all of us. 97 00:06:17.220 --> 00:06:20.680 And this is one reason why it really is one of those issues 98 00:06:20.680 --> 00:06:22.720 that as many speakers have already said, 99 00:06:22.800 --> 00:06:24.440 really does affect all of us. 100 00:06:24.460 --> 00:06:27.120 No matter how removed we may think we are 101 00:06:27.120 --> 00:06:30.900 from a direct interaction with these substances. 102 00:06:32.720 --> 00:06:36.420 So I kind of tried in my research to really start from scratch, 103 00:06:36.480 --> 00:06:39.620 to stand back a bit from all of the usual arguments 104 00:06:39.620 --> 00:06:43.180 and especially this whole atmosphere of hysteria and paranoia 105 00:06:43.180 --> 00:06:44.880 surrounding the whole debate 106 00:06:44.880 --> 00:06:48.620 and try and ask some relatively straightforward questions. 107 00:06:49.180 --> 00:06:52.660 What are these substances that are at issue? 108 00:06:52.780 --> 00:06:53.980 The scheduled substances? 109 00:06:53.980 --> 00:06:55.180 And what are the consequences in international law? 110 00:06:55.400 --> 00:06:56.700 How do they work? 111 00:06:56.940 --> 00:07:01.100 And how is it that this relatively small handful of chemicals 112 00:07:01.100 --> 00:07:05.040 has enjoyed such an enormous and powerful influence 113 00:07:05.040 --> 00:07:06.640 on the history of human culture? 114 00:07:07.220 --> 00:07:09.880 So I'd like to raise these questions today 115 00:07:09.880 --> 00:07:14.260 in relation to a few different spheres and levels of cultural life. 116 00:07:14.940 --> 00:07:19.060 First of all, our culture in the normal sense of the word culture, 117 00:07:19.180 --> 00:07:21.160 that is the arts, literature and so on. 118 00:07:21.240 --> 00:07:23.860 And I'll be looking especially at the literary influences. 119 00:07:24.500 --> 00:07:28.440 At our political, economic system as well at that level. 120 00:07:29.200 --> 00:07:33.140 And also at the level, the micro level of the human brain itself. 121 00:07:33.480 --> 00:07:35.680 And these can all be considered kind of cultures 122 00:07:35.680 --> 00:07:41.500 and all different levels of the broad scheme of human culture. 123 00:07:43.260 --> 00:07:45.120 And when we look at these different levels, 124 00:07:45.220 --> 00:07:49.140 we can see that the substances that we have been brought up to believe 125 00:07:49.140 --> 00:07:53.740 are alien, foreign substances, somehow enemies, 126 00:07:53.980 --> 00:07:57.860 external threats that have come from elsewhere into our culture. 127 00:07:57.980 --> 00:08:01.300 That in fact, they're not at all these outsiders. 128 00:08:01.680 --> 00:08:06.040 That they are very close, very imminent to our culture 129 00:08:06.040 --> 00:08:08.560 on all these different levels that I will be talking about. 130 00:08:09.060 --> 00:08:12.860 As I say, they're certainly often portrayed as kind of foreign bodies 131 00:08:12.860 --> 00:08:14.160 or alien substances. 132 00:08:14.620 --> 00:08:17.500 But in fact, they've always been embedded in our culture 133 00:08:17.500 --> 00:08:21.500 and this is true in almost every culture that we have records of historically. 134 00:08:22.920 --> 00:08:23.940 And really, they're not. 135 00:08:23.980 --> 00:08:27.520 They're not new imports to modern society in any sense. 136 00:08:27.780 --> 00:08:29.020 They are really endemic. 137 00:08:29.120 --> 00:08:31.460 They are native substances to all of us. 138 00:08:32.380 --> 00:08:34.300 But of course, as we know, 139 00:08:34.460 --> 00:08:38.300 Western governments have been more than keen to portray drugs 140 00:08:38.300 --> 00:08:41.300 and all of the culture surrounding them, 141 00:08:41.380 --> 00:08:43.320 including the dealers, the users, 142 00:08:44.160 --> 00:08:47.580 as enemies on which Western governments are waging 143 00:08:47.580 --> 00:08:49.480 not only a rhetorical war, 144 00:08:49.620 --> 00:08:52.840 but also, of course, a very real military war in many senses. 145 00:08:53.980 --> 00:08:56.200 But of course, they're far less willing to admit 146 00:08:56.200 --> 00:09:00.900 that drugs have often been their closest friends of Western governments. 147 00:09:01.120 --> 00:09:04.180 And again, Alfred has already given in great detail 148 00:09:04.180 --> 00:09:08.700 some of the more, a very incisive look 149 00:09:08.700 --> 00:09:11.360 at exactly how close this alliance has been. 150 00:09:12.240 --> 00:09:15.180 So just to give a few further examples, 151 00:09:15.360 --> 00:09:17.220 although obviously it's the leading player 152 00:09:17.220 --> 00:09:19.840 in the struggle for a drug-free world, 153 00:09:20.500 --> 00:09:23.240 drugs traders have often made very good allies to the US 154 00:09:23.240 --> 00:09:23.960 in the Cold War. 155 00:09:23.960 --> 00:09:25.340 The Cold War struggle against communism, 156 00:09:26.120 --> 00:09:29.920 so much so that the trade has often been aided, 157 00:09:30.040 --> 00:09:31.860 abetted, sometimes even established 158 00:09:31.860 --> 00:09:33.500 by American government agencies. 159 00:09:34.000 --> 00:09:36.260 And this is a story, as Alfred has said, 160 00:09:36.340 --> 00:09:38.880 which repeated itself through the Vietnam War 161 00:09:38.880 --> 00:09:41.500 in South America and in Western Asia 162 00:09:41.500 --> 00:09:43.360 and, of course, continues now. 163 00:09:44.160 --> 00:09:45.620 Going back a bit further, 164 00:09:45.880 --> 00:09:48.440 Britain's record, which is, of course, much older, 165 00:09:48.480 --> 00:09:49.740 but definitely no cleaner. 166 00:09:50.540 --> 00:09:52.780 Really, it seems that even the most vicious 167 00:09:52.780 --> 00:09:53.940 of today's drug companies, 168 00:09:53.960 --> 00:09:55.920 cartels, are simply following in the footsteps 169 00:09:55.920 --> 00:09:57.540 of the British East India Company, 170 00:09:57.940 --> 00:10:00.020 whose sales of opium to China 171 00:10:00.020 --> 00:10:02.960 brought the Chinese empire to its knees. 172 00:10:03.140 --> 00:10:04.760 Really, it's considered to be, I think, 173 00:10:04.760 --> 00:10:06.420 what was really the last straw 174 00:10:06.420 --> 00:10:09.660 for the Chinese empire in the 19th century. 175 00:10:10.620 --> 00:10:13.160 And simultaneously, that trade provided 176 00:10:13.160 --> 00:10:14.700 much of the financial backing 177 00:10:14.700 --> 00:10:16.800 for British industrialization 178 00:10:16.800 --> 00:10:19.260 in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 179 00:10:19.540 --> 00:10:22.820 And although Britain was really directly involved in this, 180 00:10:22.840 --> 00:10:23.800 and very explicitly, 181 00:10:23.800 --> 00:10:25.800 complicit in that relationship, 182 00:10:26.180 --> 00:10:28.820 clearly, if we look at the history of industrialization, 183 00:10:29.180 --> 00:10:32.700 we are all now the beneficiaries of that history. 184 00:10:32.880 --> 00:10:34.640 So, to some extent, all of the wealth, 185 00:10:34.720 --> 00:10:37.580 including buildings such as the one in which we're sitting now, 186 00:10:37.900 --> 00:10:41.160 were more or less indirectly funded 187 00:10:41.160 --> 00:10:45.080 by that great upsurge in the opium trade in the 19th century. 188 00:10:46.540 --> 00:10:49.520 So, clearly, the political and the economic standing 189 00:10:49.520 --> 00:10:51.420 of the West has greatly benefited 190 00:10:51.420 --> 00:10:53.780 from the trade in drugs in the 19th century. 191 00:10:53.800 --> 00:10:57.760 But I also got very interested in the ways 192 00:10:57.760 --> 00:11:01.460 in which many powerful aspects of our cultural life, 193 00:11:01.540 --> 00:11:05.060 in the sense of the arts, literature, intellectual thought, 194 00:11:05.280 --> 00:11:07.200 have also been shaped by their use. 195 00:11:08.360 --> 00:11:10.400 Perhaps one of the most famous examples 196 00:11:10.400 --> 00:11:12.460 in the early 19th century, 197 00:11:12.500 --> 00:11:15.240 at this same period when the opium trade was at its height, 198 00:11:15.400 --> 00:11:17.920 is the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 199 00:11:18.680 --> 00:11:20.760 who, I'm sure many people will know, 200 00:11:20.920 --> 00:11:23.020 tried to transcribe the poem, 201 00:11:23.160 --> 00:11:23.780 Kubla Khan, 202 00:11:23.780 --> 00:11:27.720 from which many of our very popular cultural images 203 00:11:27.720 --> 00:11:28.800 from that period come, 204 00:11:28.980 --> 00:11:31.520 such as the whole notion of Xanadu and the Pleasure Dome. 205 00:11:31.640 --> 00:11:35.000 These are images that constantly get replayed in popular culture. 206 00:11:35.300 --> 00:11:38.980 He really transcribed that poem from an opiated dream. 207 00:11:39.380 --> 00:11:42.420 It's quite a funny story, if you don't already know it, 208 00:11:42.440 --> 00:11:46.400 that Coleridge, having taken rather a large dose of opium, 209 00:11:46.460 --> 00:11:49.580 found himself being given the lines of this poem. 210 00:11:49.900 --> 00:11:53.280 He very quickly tried to scribble it down before it left him, 211 00:11:53.280 --> 00:11:56.360 somebody knocked on the door, unfortunately, and interrupted him. 212 00:11:56.440 --> 00:11:58.500 The story is that somebody came to the door 213 00:11:58.500 --> 00:11:59.700 and wanted to borrow some milk. 214 00:11:59.920 --> 00:12:02.000 So this very prosaic interruption 215 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:04.360 meant that he lost the end of the poem, 216 00:12:04.460 --> 00:12:05.900 and that's why Kubla Khan, 217 00:12:06.100 --> 00:12:07.340 or this is Coleridge's story, 218 00:12:07.480 --> 00:12:09.660 why Kubla Khan was never completed. 219 00:12:11.020 --> 00:12:13.700 But that poem had an enormous influence 220 00:12:13.700 --> 00:12:15.460 on subsequent generations, 221 00:12:15.660 --> 00:12:17.180 and certainly his contemporaries, 222 00:12:17.180 --> 00:12:19.160 of writers and poets and thinkers. 223 00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:22.420 And it seems that it almost threw out a challenge, really, 224 00:12:22.420 --> 00:12:23.260 to many people, 225 00:12:23.280 --> 00:12:24.220 to many people of his generation, 226 00:12:24.460 --> 00:12:26.420 that there was this potential 227 00:12:26.420 --> 00:12:29.500 to tap into this other dimension 228 00:12:29.500 --> 00:12:32.980 from which poetry such as Kubla Khan could come. 229 00:12:33.220 --> 00:12:35.960 And the challenge was to get it down on paper. 230 00:12:36.260 --> 00:12:39.700 So this experiment really was repeated many, many times 231 00:12:39.700 --> 00:12:41.200 through the 19th century 232 00:12:41.200 --> 00:12:44.660 by generations of poets and novelists and philosophers. 233 00:12:45.320 --> 00:12:48.180 And it's striking that some of these experiments 234 00:12:48.180 --> 00:12:49.660 and many of the results 235 00:12:50.280 --> 00:12:51.920 probably have amounted 236 00:12:51.920 --> 00:12:55.040 to some of the most influential works of literature 237 00:12:55.920 --> 00:12:57.580 that were produced in that period. 238 00:12:58.300 --> 00:12:59.580 To give you a few examples, 239 00:12:59.900 --> 00:13:03.140 there's a book called The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, 240 00:13:03.380 --> 00:13:05.020 which is widely considered to be 241 00:13:05.020 --> 00:13:07.420 the very first detective novel 242 00:13:07.420 --> 00:13:09.460 ever written in the English language. 243 00:13:10.060 --> 00:13:11.280 And this book was, 244 00:13:11.420 --> 00:13:14.580 it actually deals with opium as one of its themes. 245 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:17.720 But it was also, according to Wilkie Collins, 246 00:13:17.920 --> 00:13:20.840 written very much under the influence of opium, 247 00:13:20.840 --> 00:13:23.880 so much so, in fact, that he said towards the end of it, 248 00:13:23.900 --> 00:13:26.100 he was so lost in his experience with the drug 249 00:13:26.100 --> 00:13:28.600 that he couldn't actually remember finishing the book. 250 00:13:30.880 --> 00:13:34.280 And there are many other examples that I could give you, 251 00:13:34.320 --> 00:13:35.760 especially about opium. 252 00:13:35.820 --> 00:13:39.800 I think opium really has had this incredible cultural role, 253 00:13:39.920 --> 00:13:41.940 and perhaps we can come back to some of them 254 00:13:41.940 --> 00:13:43.620 in a discussion if anybody's interested. 255 00:13:44.100 --> 00:13:46.160 But it's by no means only the opiates 256 00:13:46.160 --> 00:13:50.740 that had this kind of influence on literature in that period. 257 00:13:50.840 --> 00:13:53.060 Towards the end of the 19th century, 258 00:13:54.380 --> 00:13:58.720 coca and cocaine later also became very influential. 259 00:13:59.180 --> 00:14:01.160 And one of the most striking cases here 260 00:14:01.160 --> 00:14:03.020 is that of Robert Louis Stevenson, 261 00:14:03.100 --> 00:14:05.900 also, again, a very big figure, very well-known writer. 262 00:14:06.620 --> 00:14:08.900 And one of his most famous stories, 263 00:14:09.100 --> 00:14:11.680 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 264 00:14:11.800 --> 00:14:16.080 this too, it seems, was written in the middle of a six-day cocaine binge. 265 00:14:17.540 --> 00:14:19.640 Now, this is, again, a very interesting case 266 00:14:19.640 --> 00:14:20.820 because, as you know, 267 00:14:20.820 --> 00:14:22.260 the story of Jekyll and Hyde 268 00:14:22.260 --> 00:14:25.140 involves a question of personality transformation. 269 00:14:26.180 --> 00:14:29.100 Jekyll takes a potion in the story, 270 00:14:29.180 --> 00:14:30.540 which is not named, of course. 271 00:14:30.900 --> 00:14:34.320 Stevenson doesn't make any reference to cocaine in the course of this. 272 00:14:34.400 --> 00:14:36.320 It's just referred to as a potion. 273 00:14:37.020 --> 00:14:40.180 But this potion has this dramatic effect on Jekyll. 274 00:14:40.240 --> 00:14:43.740 It turns him, of course, into this completely alien character. 275 00:14:43.900 --> 00:14:46.040 Hyde even changes his body, 276 00:14:46.200 --> 00:14:48.120 not only the way that he thinks and behaves. 277 00:14:49.060 --> 00:14:50.800 And the knowledge that this story 278 00:14:50.820 --> 00:14:53.060 was written under the influence of cocaine 279 00:14:53.820 --> 00:14:55.560 obviously tells us a great deal about 280 00:14:55.560 --> 00:14:57.560 what was going through Stevenson's mind 281 00:14:57.560 --> 00:15:01.200 and what he's really trying to say about the personality change 282 00:15:01.200 --> 00:15:03.180 that you can get with a drug like cocaine. 283 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:06.160 Or certainly the story, I suppose, 284 00:15:06.360 --> 00:15:08.720 kind of caricatures that experience 285 00:15:08.720 --> 00:15:12.120 of adding such a powerful substance 286 00:15:12.120 --> 00:15:15.260 and really changing the way in which your brain works 287 00:15:15.260 --> 00:15:16.960 and therefore the way in which you think 288 00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:19.980 and therefore the way in which you operate as an individual. 289 00:15:19.980 --> 00:15:23.360 So it raises many interesting questions about identity 290 00:15:23.980 --> 00:15:26.420 and the ways in which drugs intervene in that. 291 00:15:27.820 --> 00:15:31.620 And also, of course, the story can tell us a lot about the effects of cocaine. 292 00:15:31.840 --> 00:15:33.960 So the two do inform each other. 293 00:15:34.240 --> 00:15:37.740 Now, this is the kind of knowledge which has been very subtly, 294 00:15:37.740 --> 00:15:40.920 I wouldn't really say repressed, that's perhaps a bit too strong, 295 00:15:41.000 --> 00:15:43.120 but it certainly tends to have been ignored 296 00:15:43.120 --> 00:15:45.760 from the history of literature and the history of ideas. 297 00:15:46.020 --> 00:15:48.200 And this is one of the more subtle, 298 00:15:48.300 --> 00:15:49.960 but perhaps the most dated, 299 00:15:49.980 --> 00:15:52.380 and the most dangerous kinds of consequences of the war on drugs, 300 00:15:52.440 --> 00:15:55.820 that it's really prevented us from acknowledging 301 00:15:55.820 --> 00:15:58.800 the impact that these substances have had 302 00:15:58.800 --> 00:16:02.780 in these more subtle, hidden, historical ways. 303 00:16:04.200 --> 00:16:07.120 Once again, there are many more examples that I could give you. 304 00:16:07.180 --> 00:16:09.340 In fact, so many that it's very difficult 305 00:16:09.340 --> 00:16:11.800 to find any writer in the 19th century 306 00:16:11.800 --> 00:16:15.260 who wasn't to some extent writing on drugs. 307 00:16:19.080 --> 00:16:21.560 But the one example that I do want to give you, 308 00:16:21.600 --> 00:16:22.640 and I will focus on, 309 00:16:22.740 --> 00:16:25.300 is another writer and thinker, 310 00:16:25.800 --> 00:16:28.080 again, a very influential figure, 311 00:16:28.280 --> 00:16:30.280 a person that was to have an enormous influence 312 00:16:30.280 --> 00:16:31.780 on 20th century culture, 313 00:16:31.960 --> 00:16:33.620 and that is Sigmund Freud. 314 00:16:34.560 --> 00:16:37.440 And Freud obviously became famous, as we all know, 315 00:16:37.520 --> 00:16:38.480 as a psychoanalyst. 316 00:16:39.220 --> 00:16:41.580 But in his early days, as a young doctor, 317 00:16:41.760 --> 00:16:44.320 he was very interested, you know, 318 00:16:44.320 --> 00:16:47.040 not so much in his later ideas about the mind, 319 00:16:47.200 --> 00:16:48.980 but he was also very interested in 320 00:16:48.980 --> 00:16:50.820 the neurochemistry of the brain. 321 00:16:51.020 --> 00:16:52.620 And in fact, he was one of the first people 322 00:16:52.620 --> 00:16:54.900 to really start to think that the brain 323 00:16:54.900 --> 00:16:56.820 was a kind of machinic entity, 324 00:16:57.020 --> 00:16:59.520 which really did have a chemistry, 325 00:16:59.700 --> 00:17:01.980 and something which could be explored 326 00:17:01.980 --> 00:17:04.380 and looked at at that level. 327 00:17:06.220 --> 00:17:08.360 And he was very interested in the idea 328 00:17:08.360 --> 00:17:11.840 that brain states and the state of that internal chemistry 329 00:17:11.840 --> 00:17:13.420 have a direct influence 330 00:17:14.320 --> 00:17:16.780 on how people think and behave and feel. 331 00:17:17.440 --> 00:17:20.400 And he wrote an essay about Kocher 332 00:17:20.400 --> 00:17:22.760 called Uber Kocher, in German, 333 00:17:22.780 --> 00:17:23.700 on Kocher. 334 00:17:23.840 --> 00:17:26.080 And this essay really made him famous. 335 00:17:26.200 --> 00:17:27.180 It really made his name. 336 00:17:27.380 --> 00:17:30.480 It was his first great introduction to public life. 337 00:17:30.960 --> 00:17:33.500 Of course, if you now look at the official 338 00:17:34.240 --> 00:17:36.060 collected works of Sigmund Freud, 339 00:17:36.140 --> 00:17:38.140 you often don't find this essay included. 340 00:17:38.440 --> 00:17:41.100 It tends, again, to have been quietly dropped 341 00:17:41.100 --> 00:17:43.660 out of his curriculum vitae, as it were. 342 00:17:43.760 --> 00:17:44.300 But it's a great book. 343 00:17:44.320 --> 00:17:45.920 But nevertheless, it was really the essay 344 00:17:45.920 --> 00:17:48.060 which launched him into public life. 345 00:17:49.080 --> 00:17:51.180 As an aside, he was also very interested 346 00:17:51.180 --> 00:17:55.840 in this drug to be used in terms of eye surgery, 347 00:17:56.080 --> 00:17:58.320 because if you're doing surgery on an eye, 348 00:17:58.380 --> 00:18:00.000 obviously the eye needs to be open, 349 00:18:00.080 --> 00:18:03.020 the person needs to be awake and conscious. 350 00:18:03.380 --> 00:18:06.000 And so really, Kocher was being looked at 351 00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:08.200 as an early local anesthetic. 352 00:18:08.300 --> 00:18:11.040 And of course, analogues of Kocher and cocaine 353 00:18:11.040 --> 00:18:12.580 are still used by dentists, 354 00:18:12.580 --> 00:18:14.840 usually under the brand of Novocaine now. 355 00:18:16.100 --> 00:18:19.500 And Freud was also very keen to look at the use 356 00:18:19.500 --> 00:18:22.540 of both Kocher and later cocaine as substitutes 357 00:18:22.540 --> 00:18:24.980 for addiction to morphine and alcohol. 358 00:18:25.180 --> 00:18:27.420 And Freud was quite naively convinced 359 00:18:27.420 --> 00:18:29.660 that cocaine was not an addictive substance 360 00:18:30.580 --> 00:18:33.760 and that it was the way to treat people 361 00:18:33.760 --> 00:18:36.880 who had addictions to morphine and alcoholism. 362 00:18:37.620 --> 00:18:40.620 And in fact, that taps into a broader story 363 00:18:40.620 --> 00:18:42.560 that many of the substances that were used 364 00:18:42.580 --> 00:18:45.740 that we now live with some of the worst consequences of, 365 00:18:45.900 --> 00:18:48.860 particularly heroin, were developed in the search 366 00:18:48.860 --> 00:18:52.960 for non-addictive substitutes for many previous drugs. 367 00:18:54.260 --> 00:18:57.400 Freud was also very interested in what he referred to 368 00:18:57.400 --> 00:19:00.660 as the stimulative effects of Kocher on the genitalia. 369 00:19:01.300 --> 00:19:04.620 And this perhaps introduced some of his later interests 370 00:19:04.620 --> 00:19:05.660 in sex and sexuality. 371 00:19:06.240 --> 00:19:10.820 At the time, he was engaged to his later wife, Martha, 372 00:19:11.120 --> 00:19:12.560 and there were some wonderful things 373 00:19:12.580 --> 00:19:15.940 that he wrote to Martha on the subject of cocaine 374 00:19:15.940 --> 00:19:18.760 and often in fact directly under the influence of cocaine, 375 00:19:19.040 --> 00:19:21.520 in one of which, for example, he warns her 376 00:19:21.520 --> 00:19:25.020 of his impending visit to her and warns her 377 00:19:25.020 --> 00:19:27.800 of the consequences of meeting with a wild man 378 00:19:27.800 --> 00:19:29.240 with cocaine in his body. 379 00:19:29.820 --> 00:19:32.180 Now, Freud was a very shy character 380 00:19:32.180 --> 00:19:35.020 and not the sort of person that perhaps would have normally 381 00:19:35.020 --> 00:19:38.680 described himself as a wild man in these terms to his fiancee. 382 00:19:38.700 --> 00:19:42.340 And it really seems that cocaine gave him a great deal of confidence 383 00:19:42.580 --> 00:19:46.500 and it really enabled him in many senses 384 00:19:46.500 --> 00:19:49.220 to overcome his kind of natural shyness. 385 00:19:50.020 --> 00:19:52.760 And I want to just give you a couple of quotations, 386 00:19:52.760 --> 00:19:55.280 not actually from his essay, but from these letters 387 00:19:55.280 --> 00:19:56.520 that he wrote to Martha. 388 00:19:56.920 --> 00:19:59.880 What's interesting about these letters is that he wrote them 389 00:19:59.880 --> 00:20:01.840 having just taken some coke. 390 00:20:01.980 --> 00:20:05.920 So these really are cases of a very literal sense 391 00:20:05.920 --> 00:20:08.660 of somebody writing under the influence of a drug, 392 00:20:08.780 --> 00:20:12.560 writing about it, but also whilst taking it, 393 00:20:12.560 --> 00:20:13.480 at the same time. 394 00:20:13.580 --> 00:20:16.240 So they're very informative from that point of view. 395 00:20:17.000 --> 00:20:20.240 So in the 1880s, he wrote a couple of letters to Martha, 396 00:20:21.180 --> 00:20:25.220 one of which describes the fact that he'd recently been to a party 397 00:20:25.220 --> 00:20:28.980 at which some leading medical people of the day were there. 398 00:20:29.140 --> 00:20:30.760 He was, as I say, very shy. 399 00:20:30.940 --> 00:20:32.820 He was very worried about going to this party. 400 00:20:33.600 --> 00:20:35.240 It was a very high-powered event. 401 00:20:35.780 --> 00:20:38.120 And so he took some cocaine before he went. 402 00:20:38.440 --> 00:20:39.840 He describes it as, 403 00:20:39.920 --> 00:20:42.080 a little cocaine to untie my tongue. 404 00:20:42.660 --> 00:20:45.200 And he goes to the party, has a wonderful time, 405 00:20:45.320 --> 00:20:46.620 he talked freely to people, 406 00:20:46.740 --> 00:20:49.360 he writes about how he'd never felt so confident 407 00:20:49.360 --> 00:20:52.320 and he was really able to engage with these great people 408 00:20:52.320 --> 00:20:55.080 that he admired and would normally have never been able to 409 00:20:55.080 --> 00:20:56.620 have the courage to speak to. 410 00:20:57.380 --> 00:20:58.500 And he says to her, 411 00:20:59.740 --> 00:21:03.420 he's almost apologising for writing so much to her, 412 00:21:03.480 --> 00:21:03.800 and he says, 413 00:21:03.900 --> 00:21:06.560 it must be that the little bit of cocaine I have just taken 414 00:21:06.560 --> 00:21:07.680 is making me talkative. 415 00:21:08.540 --> 00:21:12.120 It also, he says, made him think that hidden under the surface 416 00:21:12.120 --> 00:21:17.020 of timidity there lay in me an extremely daring and fearless being. 417 00:21:17.320 --> 00:21:19.360 So it's like he discovered this kind of, 418 00:21:19.380 --> 00:21:21.880 well, the wild man maybe, inside himself. 419 00:21:22.500 --> 00:21:23.980 He then goes on and says, 420 00:21:24.160 --> 00:21:27.840 here I am making silly confessions to you, my sweet darling, 421 00:21:28.100 --> 00:21:29.840 and really without any reason whatever, 422 00:21:30.180 --> 00:21:33.060 unless it is the cocaine which makes me talk so much. 423 00:21:33.800 --> 00:21:36.840 Now, I give you those quotations because remember, 424 00:21:36.960 --> 00:21:40.120 this is before Freud developed his theories of psychoanalysis. 425 00:21:40.900 --> 00:21:41.980 And obviously, 426 00:21:41.980 --> 00:21:44.780 before it came to have its enormous cultural influence. 427 00:21:45.060 --> 00:21:48.300 And it was also before the period of prohibition. 428 00:21:48.300 --> 00:21:52.560 It was before the period when cocaine was discredited 429 00:21:52.560 --> 00:21:55.580 and before it was realised that it did have 430 00:21:55.580 --> 00:21:59.340 some less fortunate consequences. 431 00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:01.820 And very shortly afterwards, indeed, 432 00:22:01.920 --> 00:22:04.020 cocaine was effectively discredited. 433 00:22:04.120 --> 00:22:09.060 One of the people who Freud had been treating for addiction to morphine 434 00:22:09.060 --> 00:22:11.700 actually died from cocaine poisoning. 435 00:22:11.980 --> 00:22:15.080 Very nearly ruining Freud's own career in the process. 436 00:22:16.400 --> 00:22:19.980 But it seems to me that the later development of psychoanalysis 437 00:22:20.760 --> 00:22:22.980 and Freud's ideas were very much influenced 438 00:22:22.980 --> 00:22:26.860 by his early experiments with cocaine. 439 00:22:27.600 --> 00:22:32.060 And especially his references to talking a lot. 440 00:22:32.440 --> 00:22:36.920 You'll be aware that psychoanalysis was really developed as the talking cure. 441 00:22:37.420 --> 00:22:40.100 The whole basis of it was that if you could talk, 442 00:22:40.200 --> 00:22:41.100 if you could confess, 443 00:22:41.100 --> 00:22:43.500 if you could allow yourself to speak freely, 444 00:22:43.740 --> 00:22:45.820 then this was the great therapy. 445 00:22:46.360 --> 00:22:47.200 And in effect, 446 00:22:47.340 --> 00:22:49.600 I think what happened for Freud as an individual 447 00:22:49.600 --> 00:22:51.480 and also for the whole culture 448 00:22:52.100 --> 00:22:55.860 was that as cocaine and the other drugs of the 19th century 449 00:22:55.860 --> 00:22:57.600 became increasingly discredited, 450 00:22:57.720 --> 00:23:01.280 as they became increasingly prohibited by law as well, 451 00:23:01.480 --> 00:23:05.180 clearly the culture really needed some kind of alternative. 452 00:23:05.260 --> 00:23:07.680 And Freud really was beginning to provide 453 00:23:07.680 --> 00:23:10.540 a sort of drug-free cure 454 00:23:10.540 --> 00:23:11.980 for the 20th century 455 00:23:12.540 --> 00:23:14.200 to replace as a kind of substitute 456 00:23:14.200 --> 00:23:17.460 for the drugs which had been used in the 19th century. 457 00:23:17.800 --> 00:23:20.280 It was a cure very much based on these ideas 458 00:23:20.280 --> 00:23:22.800 of talking, of confessing, 459 00:23:22.800 --> 00:23:25.460 and of exploring this hidden self, 460 00:23:25.680 --> 00:23:26.940 the unconscious of course, 461 00:23:26.960 --> 00:23:29.240 as Freud later came to call it. 462 00:23:30.920 --> 00:23:34.380 This is really an example of how it seems to me 463 00:23:34.380 --> 00:23:36.180 that a substance like cocaine 464 00:23:36.180 --> 00:23:39.660 is actually at the heart of our culture. 465 00:23:39.720 --> 00:23:40.140 But again, 466 00:23:40.540 --> 00:23:41.960 it's a story that's very rarely told. 467 00:23:42.420 --> 00:23:44.440 So psychoanalysis really developed 468 00:23:44.440 --> 00:23:46.580 as a cure for the culture, 469 00:23:46.700 --> 00:23:48.400 but also a cure for Freud himself. 470 00:23:48.900 --> 00:23:50.320 There was really the idea that 471 00:23:50.320 --> 00:23:52.760 if he couldn't have cocaine to occupy his mind, 472 00:23:52.820 --> 00:23:54.760 then he needed some other practice, 473 00:23:54.980 --> 00:23:56.800 and analysis was his alternative. 474 00:23:57.640 --> 00:24:00.320 He needed something to in effect get his teeth into, 475 00:24:00.480 --> 00:24:03.460 to keep his mind busy in the absence of cocaine. 476 00:24:03.820 --> 00:24:05.880 And this is a theme that's reiterated 477 00:24:05.880 --> 00:24:08.420 in Conan Doyle's stories, 478 00:24:08.460 --> 00:24:09.420 where Sherlock Holmes, 479 00:24:09.420 --> 00:24:11.380 again a great cocaine user, 480 00:24:11.600 --> 00:24:13.020 he's not playing his violin, 481 00:24:13.240 --> 00:24:15.100 he's usually taking morphine or cocaine. 482 00:24:15.500 --> 00:24:17.100 And he too would often say, 483 00:24:17.220 --> 00:24:18.560 if I haven't got a good case, 484 00:24:18.600 --> 00:24:19.380 I need cocaine. 485 00:24:19.780 --> 00:24:21.840 You know, that he could only stop using coke 486 00:24:21.840 --> 00:24:24.780 if he had a good case to analyze, 487 00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:28.160 to exercise his detective skills, 488 00:24:28.380 --> 00:24:29.740 really the same detective skills 489 00:24:29.740 --> 00:24:32.420 that Freud was using with his patients as well. 490 00:24:32.880 --> 00:24:34.060 And as an aside, 491 00:24:34.360 --> 00:24:37.940 there is a story that Sherlock Holmes, 492 00:24:38.080 --> 00:24:39.400 when he famously died, 493 00:24:39.420 --> 00:24:41.680 he disappeared after his encounter with Moriarty 494 00:24:41.680 --> 00:24:42.460 at the Rhinefell, 495 00:24:42.600 --> 00:24:44.380 in fact went to visit Freud 496 00:24:44.380 --> 00:24:47.060 in order to be cured of his addiction to cocaine, 497 00:24:47.320 --> 00:24:48.300 and then later returned 498 00:24:48.300 --> 00:24:50.560 for the later Sherlock Holmes stories. 499 00:24:52.000 --> 00:24:53.320 And in many ways, 500 00:24:53.320 --> 00:24:55.320 as I say, psychoanalysis seemed to be 501 00:24:55.320 --> 00:24:57.100 a kind of cure for the whole culture. 502 00:24:57.280 --> 00:24:59.660 This was now the era of prohibition. 503 00:24:59.680 --> 00:25:01.760 All these 19th century ways, 504 00:25:02.020 --> 00:25:04.400 explored by Coleridge, De Quincey, 505 00:25:04.400 --> 00:25:05.020 Wilkie Collins, 506 00:25:05.360 --> 00:25:07.120 all these 19th century writers, 507 00:25:07.320 --> 00:25:09.260 all these ways of exploring dreams, 508 00:25:09.420 --> 00:25:10.660 of magnifying dreams, 509 00:25:10.960 --> 00:25:13.420 were now substituted by psychoanalysis, 510 00:25:13.520 --> 00:25:16.080 which was a kind of drug-free alternative 511 00:25:16.080 --> 00:25:19.780 to the 19th century's experiments with drugs. 512 00:25:19.980 --> 00:25:22.280 And one could also say it was as expensive 513 00:25:22.280 --> 00:25:24.560 and as addictive as the drugs 514 00:25:24.560 --> 00:25:25.800 that it was replacing as well. 515 00:25:27.420 --> 00:25:29.000 And the turn of the century 516 00:25:29.000 --> 00:25:31.100 really marked the turn 517 00:25:31.100 --> 00:25:33.320 in this whole sort of cultural turn. 518 00:25:33.460 --> 00:25:35.700 In 1900, Freud published 519 00:25:35.700 --> 00:25:37.540 The Interpretation of Dreams. 520 00:25:37.540 --> 00:25:39.540 And with that text, 521 00:25:39.580 --> 00:25:43.060 that really launched this whole 20th century approach 522 00:25:43.060 --> 00:25:45.160 to questions which, as I say, 523 00:25:45.220 --> 00:25:47.900 had really been dealt with by drugs in the past. 524 00:25:48.180 --> 00:25:50.460 Now dreams were not to be explored, 525 00:25:50.740 --> 00:25:51.940 not to be magnified, 526 00:25:52.160 --> 00:25:53.420 but to be interpreted. 527 00:25:53.800 --> 00:25:55.340 It's a very subtle shift, 528 00:25:55.560 --> 00:25:56.980 but a very significant one. 529 00:25:58.980 --> 00:26:00.980 And you can see the same story 530 00:26:00.980 --> 00:26:03.240 at this period, at this turn of the century, 531 00:26:03.380 --> 00:26:05.820 unfolding in many different spheres. 532 00:26:06.020 --> 00:26:07.380 We have it here in the sort of 533 00:26:07.380 --> 00:26:08.760 intellectual cultural sphere, 534 00:26:09.040 --> 00:26:10.420 but at the same time, 535 00:26:10.440 --> 00:26:13.300 we also have it in more economic contexts as well. 536 00:26:13.540 --> 00:26:15.100 And the parallel story, 537 00:26:15.280 --> 00:26:17.580 the story that directly relates to 538 00:26:17.580 --> 00:26:20.320 Freud's own move away from cocaine 539 00:26:20.320 --> 00:26:22.240 and into a new kind of analysis 540 00:26:22.240 --> 00:26:24.740 is the story of Coca-Cola. 541 00:26:26.180 --> 00:26:27.760 It's, of course, again, well known 542 00:26:27.760 --> 00:26:30.640 that Coca-Cola, like many similar products of its time, 543 00:26:30.720 --> 00:26:33.660 carried a very substantial amount of cocaine 544 00:26:33.660 --> 00:26:35.920 in the late 19th century, 545 00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:37.360 when it was first produced in the United States. 546 00:26:37.380 --> 00:26:37.640 And it was produced in Atlanta. 547 00:26:38.020 --> 00:26:41.880 In fact, it's often said that every bottle of cocaine, 548 00:26:42.240 --> 00:26:44.200 sorry, every bottle of Coca-Cola 549 00:26:44.200 --> 00:26:46.180 had a line of cocaine in it, 550 00:26:46.220 --> 00:26:47.660 the equivalent of a line of cocaine in it. 551 00:26:47.740 --> 00:26:50.840 So clearly this was a powerful stimulant drink. 552 00:26:50.980 --> 00:26:52.620 And of course it was advertised as such. 553 00:26:52.740 --> 00:26:55.120 It was advertised as a stimulant, 554 00:26:55.120 --> 00:26:55.860 as a pick-me-up. 555 00:26:56.480 --> 00:26:59.680 This was the period of a whole new wave 556 00:26:59.680 --> 00:27:02.000 of industrial processes. 557 00:27:02.800 --> 00:27:06.580 Electricity was new, typewriters, light bulbs, 558 00:27:07.380 --> 00:27:09.120 the world of things turning on, 559 00:27:09.200 --> 00:27:11.340 new things happening, telephones, 560 00:27:11.520 --> 00:27:12.640 the world getting wired up. 561 00:27:12.860 --> 00:27:16.260 And popularity of coca and cocaine-laced products 562 00:27:16.260 --> 00:27:17.660 was very much a part of that. 563 00:27:17.740 --> 00:27:20.380 The whole culture was kind of trying to catch up 564 00:27:20.380 --> 00:27:23.100 or keep up to speed, if you like, 565 00:27:23.260 --> 00:27:24.580 with these new developments. 566 00:27:24.740 --> 00:27:25.760 I didn't really mean that pun, 567 00:27:25.880 --> 00:27:26.820 because that's the wrong drug. 568 00:27:27.000 --> 00:27:27.660 But anyway. 569 00:27:28.440 --> 00:27:31.240 But certainly there is the same kind of stimulation going on. 570 00:27:31.280 --> 00:27:33.940 And it is interesting that often cocaine is described 571 00:27:33.940 --> 00:27:37.260 as a kind of electricity in the brain, 572 00:27:37.380 --> 00:27:38.440 or that's the kind of effect. 573 00:27:38.780 --> 00:27:41.340 And clearly this was the era of electrification. 574 00:27:41.700 --> 00:27:43.600 So there is that direct connection. 575 00:27:45.360 --> 00:27:48.440 Again, the Coca-Cola company had the same problem 576 00:27:48.440 --> 00:27:49.740 as Freud, of course. 577 00:27:49.900 --> 00:27:51.840 Cocaine had really made their reputation. 578 00:27:52.180 --> 00:27:53.500 It had made them a big corporation, 579 00:27:53.820 --> 00:27:56.020 a very popular drink. 580 00:27:56.460 --> 00:27:57.700 But once again, 581 00:27:57.880 --> 00:28:01.980 as the reputation of cocaine began to plummet 582 00:28:01.980 --> 00:28:03.400 at the turn of the century, 583 00:28:03.580 --> 00:28:06.260 then clearly also the Coca-Cola company, 584 00:28:06.340 --> 00:28:06.980 like Freud, 585 00:28:07.380 --> 00:28:09.880 had to move away from their use of the drug. 586 00:28:09.960 --> 00:28:12.640 They too had to disassociate themselves from the drug. 587 00:28:13.380 --> 00:28:15.120 And they too had to find an alternative. 588 00:28:15.460 --> 00:28:18.680 And Freud, of course, moved towards psychoanalysis. 589 00:28:18.960 --> 00:28:20.300 The Coca-Cola company, 590 00:28:20.560 --> 00:28:22.640 I think their equivalent was advertising. 591 00:28:25.380 --> 00:28:28.380 The Coca-Cola company was really the first company 592 00:28:28.380 --> 00:28:31.940 to develop the kind of mass advertising campaigns 593 00:28:31.940 --> 00:28:35.080 that we now live with every day of our lives. 594 00:28:36.180 --> 00:28:39.260 Probably they were not single-handedly responsible for this, 595 00:28:39.340 --> 00:28:42.060 but they certainly did have a very big part to play 596 00:28:42.060 --> 00:28:44.980 in the birth of this kind of mass advertising. 597 00:28:45.380 --> 00:28:49.060 The giant billboards you still see in many parts of the world, 598 00:28:49.100 --> 00:28:53.400 whole buildings, even roads painted with Coca-Cola slogans. 599 00:28:53.640 --> 00:28:56.440 That kind of mass advertising, 600 00:28:56.640 --> 00:28:57.740 saturation advertising, 601 00:28:57.840 --> 00:29:01.500 was very new and was really pretty much initiated 602 00:29:01.500 --> 00:29:03.260 by the Coca-Cola company. 603 00:29:03.600 --> 00:29:04.940 Very seductive advertising. 604 00:29:04.940 --> 00:29:10.200 And it seems that advertising really was the kind of alternative hook, 605 00:29:10.420 --> 00:29:13.160 the substitute for the addictive substance 606 00:29:13.160 --> 00:29:15.380 that they'd had to remove from the drug. 607 00:29:15.520 --> 00:29:19.400 So they took the Coca out and they put the advertising in. 608 00:29:19.640 --> 00:29:22.200 And it seems to me that throughout the 20th century, 609 00:29:22.300 --> 00:29:25.020 and if we're looking at the whole history of consumer capitalism 610 00:29:25.020 --> 00:29:26.840 that we now live with, 611 00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:32.400 in effect, that is a story of pursuing many of the effects of drugs 612 00:29:32.400 --> 00:29:33.900 without the drugs themselves. 613 00:29:33.900 --> 00:29:37.740 All commodities have now tried to be addictive. 614 00:29:37.980 --> 00:29:40.120 And if you look at advertising from this perspective, 615 00:29:40.300 --> 00:29:43.340 you will see, of course, it's continually trying to hook you in, 616 00:29:43.380 --> 00:29:44.740 to get you to come back for more. 617 00:29:45.340 --> 00:29:50.360 There is this direct relation between what all commodities have now become 618 00:29:50.360 --> 00:29:55.980 and this early relationship with the literally addictive substances 619 00:29:55.980 --> 00:30:00.340 that were almost a kind of pioneer, flagship commodities in this sense. 620 00:30:01.740 --> 00:30:03.660 So in effect, capitalism, it seems, 621 00:30:03.660 --> 00:30:05.320 has made junkies out of all of us. 622 00:30:05.420 --> 00:30:08.300 And this is a theme that, again, I think has been touched on several times 623 00:30:08.300 --> 00:30:09.180 in the last few days. 624 00:30:09.680 --> 00:30:12.660 William Burroughs is the person who probably said it best, 625 00:30:12.820 --> 00:30:14.900 that junk is the ultimate merchandise. 626 00:30:15.140 --> 00:30:17.880 It sells itself. It needs no salesman. 627 00:30:18.020 --> 00:30:21.180 And it's a very interesting fact that we've often, 628 00:30:21.320 --> 00:30:24.200 in the last couple of days, been talking about the vast scale 629 00:30:24.200 --> 00:30:27.300 of the drugs market and of drug sales. 630 00:30:27.600 --> 00:30:28.860 But of course, it's very true. 631 00:30:28.960 --> 00:30:31.360 There are no salesmen. There is no advertising. 632 00:30:31.840 --> 00:30:33.640 Every other commodity does not sell. 633 00:30:33.660 --> 00:30:35.640 It's a great deal of advertising. 634 00:30:36.160 --> 00:30:41.260 And as I say, the drugs have their own implicit advert. 635 00:30:41.540 --> 00:30:44.240 That is the addictive, compelling nature of them. 636 00:30:44.360 --> 00:30:48.040 Every other commodity aspires to produce that through advertising. 637 00:30:50.200 --> 00:30:53.880 So one way or another, by the early 20th century, 638 00:30:53.960 --> 00:31:00.140 clearly drugs had a great influence on the world in which we now live. 639 00:31:00.380 --> 00:31:03.640 And although both cocaine and the opiates had been used 640 00:31:03.660 --> 00:31:04.800 to produce drugs, they had pretty much gone underground 641 00:31:04.800 --> 00:31:06.940 by the end of the First World War. 642 00:31:07.140 --> 00:31:10.880 Of course, as we all know, they continued to exert a great influence 643 00:31:10.880 --> 00:31:13.440 on Western intellectual culture. 644 00:31:13.920 --> 00:31:17.460 And again, I'll just give you very, very few examples. 645 00:31:18.480 --> 00:31:21.460 Writers like Walter Benjamin, a fascinating case. 646 00:31:22.360 --> 00:31:26.680 He developed a notion of what he called the aura of the work of art, 647 00:31:26.740 --> 00:31:30.460 a sense of a work of art not simply being a passive object, 648 00:31:30.580 --> 00:31:31.880 which is just sitting there, 649 00:31:33.660 --> 00:31:35.420 and you as the active perceiving subject, 650 00:31:35.760 --> 00:31:38.720 but in fact that the work of art is speaking to you, 651 00:31:38.880 --> 00:31:44.900 that it's not simply an object, it too has an activity inherent in it. 652 00:31:45.000 --> 00:31:46.340 It too speaks to you. 653 00:31:46.600 --> 00:31:49.240 And this is a notion that he first developed, it seems, 654 00:31:49.460 --> 00:31:52.220 in an essay called Hashish and Marseille, 655 00:31:53.020 --> 00:31:54.300 Hashish and Marseille, sorry, 656 00:31:54.420 --> 00:31:57.720 where he discusses the effects of smoking hashish 657 00:31:57.720 --> 00:32:02.300 and looking at objects and perceiving them to have some kind of almost soul 658 00:32:03.660 --> 00:32:05.580 which is the term that he went on to develop. 659 00:32:05.900 --> 00:32:09.160 Now again, this is a concept that has become incredibly influential 660 00:32:09.160 --> 00:32:14.500 in many circles around the arts and humanities. 661 00:32:14.860 --> 00:32:19.740 It's the kind of issue that comes up on all undergraduate humanities and arts courses, 662 00:32:19.940 --> 00:32:22.440 but obviously it's an issue rather like with Freud 663 00:32:22.440 --> 00:32:26.500 that comes up completely cleansed of any association 664 00:32:26.500 --> 00:32:32.280 with what I think is its true origin in Walter Benjamin's experimentation with hashish 665 00:32:32.280 --> 00:32:33.640 and indeed many other drugs. 666 00:32:34.560 --> 00:32:38.080 And very recently, obviously, this trend continues. 667 00:32:38.600 --> 00:32:42.660 Philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, 668 00:32:42.800 --> 00:32:46.160 all clearly experimented with many drugs, 669 00:32:46.380 --> 00:32:49.780 even though they too have been very reluctant to say so 670 00:32:49.780 --> 00:32:53.760 because they too were writing in an era of prohibition, 671 00:32:53.780 --> 00:32:55.800 60s, 70s, 80s. 672 00:32:56.220 --> 00:33:02.100 When Foucault, for example, he once makes some reference to LSD and opium 673 00:33:02.100 --> 00:33:03.640 in the course of reviewing one of his works, 674 00:33:03.660 --> 00:33:04.560 one of Deleuze's books, 675 00:33:04.800 --> 00:33:09.760 and Deleuze adds a little footnote which is actually very incriminatory 676 00:33:09.760 --> 00:33:11.760 and says, what will they think of us? 677 00:33:12.180 --> 00:33:15.300 So there is this great fear, or there has been until recently, 678 00:33:15.360 --> 00:33:21.200 a great fear of acknowledging the influence that these substances may have played 679 00:33:21.200 --> 00:33:25.340 in some of our most sort of mainstream cultural thinkers. 680 00:33:29.400 --> 00:33:32.600 The study of the work of writers and thinkers 681 00:33:32.600 --> 00:33:35.580 who have expressly written under the influence of drugs 682 00:33:36.520 --> 00:33:39.960 seems to me to have a lot of fascinating implications. 683 00:33:41.300 --> 00:33:45.440 For one thing, it gives us a chance, as with somebody like Freud, 684 00:33:45.540 --> 00:33:49.460 who actually says, I have just taken some cocaine and now I'm writing this down. 685 00:33:49.740 --> 00:33:52.320 It gives us a chance in those circumstances 686 00:33:53.760 --> 00:33:58.280 to really see on paper some kind of expression of the drug. 687 00:33:58.340 --> 00:34:02.060 If you like, to see the particular drug speaking through the person 688 00:34:02.060 --> 00:34:03.320 who is using it. 689 00:34:03.460 --> 00:34:07.100 There really is a sense in which a brain, in Freud's case, 690 00:34:07.160 --> 00:34:09.820 a brain that is directly under the influence of cocaine 691 00:34:09.820 --> 00:34:14.320 is actually writing, communicating, informing us about the difference 692 00:34:14.320 --> 00:34:17.140 that it's making to the person who's taking it. 693 00:34:17.420 --> 00:34:20.120 So in that sense alone, it's a very instructive place 694 00:34:20.120 --> 00:34:23.360 to try and begin to work out, quite simply, 695 00:34:23.380 --> 00:34:26.040 how these substances work and what their effects are. 696 00:34:27.360 --> 00:34:31.920 Secondly, it does suggest that there are many ways in which these substances 697 00:34:32.060 --> 00:34:35.060 which, as I say, we're so used to thinking are somehow alien, 698 00:34:35.260 --> 00:34:37.840 nothing to do with us, other people have taken them, 699 00:34:39.580 --> 00:34:43.000 it really suggests to us that these substances have in fact 700 00:34:43.000 --> 00:34:46.620 vicariously, indirectly influenced the broader culture. 701 00:34:46.980 --> 00:34:51.400 It's obvious that all psychoactive substances have dramatic 702 00:34:52.060 --> 00:34:55.160 and often very ambivalent effects on their individual users, 703 00:34:55.420 --> 00:34:59.720 but what really fascinates me is this sense in which their historical use 704 00:34:59.720 --> 00:35:02.040 has changed the sensibilities of people who have taken them. 705 00:35:02.060 --> 00:35:05.160 It's obvious that the most sober, drug-free members of society, 706 00:35:05.660 --> 00:35:10.440 poems like Kublai Khan, which, as I say, give us so many resonant images, 707 00:35:11.020 --> 00:35:15.200 stories like Jekyll and Hyde, which have become part of our kind of cultural landscape, 708 00:35:15.640 --> 00:35:17.800 they've found their way into all of our lives, 709 00:35:17.920 --> 00:35:21.620 they've really provided us with some of our most enduring images, 710 00:35:21.860 --> 00:35:25.220 and psychoanalysis, of course, again, had an enormous impact 711 00:35:25.220 --> 00:35:27.460 on the course of 20th century thinking. 712 00:35:28.580 --> 00:35:32.040 So this is one reason why I looked at the work of many writers, 713 00:35:32.040 --> 00:35:33.780 in the last couple of hundred years, 714 00:35:33.920 --> 00:35:37.320 not to produce some kind of list of which writers have used which drugs, 715 00:35:37.440 --> 00:35:39.620 and as I say, if you go back to the 19th century, 716 00:35:39.720 --> 00:35:43.760 it's difficult to find any writers who didn't use some intoxicant, 717 00:35:43.900 --> 00:35:47.220 but simply because it can be such a good medium, literature, 718 00:35:47.500 --> 00:35:49.940 in which to observe the effects of these substances, 719 00:35:50.300 --> 00:35:53.800 both, as I say, on the people who are literally writing under their influence, 720 00:35:54.000 --> 00:35:57.640 but also on all of us, the people who read their work. 721 00:35:58.900 --> 00:36:02.020 And it also, I think, says something to us, 722 00:36:02.040 --> 00:36:04.780 about the materiality of the history of ideas. 723 00:36:05.080 --> 00:36:09.460 We're very used to thinking of ideas operating in their own dimension, 724 00:36:09.840 --> 00:36:13.760 that they pass through history, that ideas move on, 725 00:36:13.820 --> 00:36:17.340 as I say, almost in a free-floating realm, 726 00:36:17.560 --> 00:36:20.160 that psychoanalysis is part of a history of ideas. 727 00:36:20.500 --> 00:36:24.480 But I'm very interested in the materiality of this history of ideas, 728 00:36:24.780 --> 00:36:29.080 and drugs are very much a place where you can see this materiality operating, 729 00:36:29.440 --> 00:36:31.880 that these really are material substances, 730 00:36:32.040 --> 00:36:37.700 that because they have this direct interaction with thought processes, 731 00:36:37.920 --> 00:36:40.200 and consequently with the work that is produced, 732 00:36:40.820 --> 00:36:43.960 they're a way in which you can really see the influence, 733 00:36:44.140 --> 00:36:47.280 not only of drugs, but of many other material influences, 734 00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:50.720 the food that we eat, the environment in which we live, 735 00:36:50.820 --> 00:36:54.060 all of this that again tends to get swept under the carpet 736 00:36:54.060 --> 00:36:59.080 and dropped out of what we tend to regard as a very idealist history of ideas. 737 00:36:59.440 --> 00:37:01.860 So this is a further reason why I think this kind of, 738 00:37:01.860 --> 00:37:03.820 research can be very instructive. 739 00:37:04.160 --> 00:37:08.140 And maybe this is what's ultimately so fascinating about drugs, 740 00:37:08.360 --> 00:37:11.800 for their users and for commentators alike. 741 00:37:12.160 --> 00:37:14.860 They are uniquely active substances. 742 00:37:15.360 --> 00:37:18.960 They are on the one hand kind of passive things, they're objects, 743 00:37:19.780 --> 00:37:22.480 they're just powders or paste or plants, 744 00:37:22.780 --> 00:37:26.320 but they're also active, they are psychoactive substances, 745 00:37:26.640 --> 00:37:29.680 which in conjunction with the human brain, as we know, 746 00:37:29.760 --> 00:37:31.440 have very powerful influences, 747 00:37:31.860 --> 00:37:34.680 on the ways in which their users think and feel 748 00:37:34.680 --> 00:37:37.020 and perceive themselves and the world. 749 00:37:39.480 --> 00:37:44.100 So it seems to me that drugs are somehow always already at work 750 00:37:44.100 --> 00:37:46.700 in our economies and in our cultures, 751 00:37:46.740 --> 00:37:51.000 and clearly this is also true to some extent in our brains as well. 752 00:37:51.520 --> 00:37:57.180 The human brain is almost by definition already predisposed 753 00:37:57.180 --> 00:38:00.240 to receive these substances which, as I said at the beginning, 754 00:38:00.320 --> 00:38:01.700 we're so used to thinking of, 755 00:38:01.700 --> 00:38:05.200 as somehow alien, outside us, remote from us. 756 00:38:05.560 --> 00:38:08.740 Most psychoactive substances are very close relatives 757 00:38:08.740 --> 00:38:11.740 of substances which are already present, 758 00:38:11.880 --> 00:38:13.700 often as neurotransmitters, 759 00:38:13.720 --> 00:38:16.260 the kind of chemical messengers in the human brain. 760 00:38:16.780 --> 00:38:20.480 So in effect the act of taking a drug doesn't so much introduce 761 00:38:20.480 --> 00:38:23.000 an alien substance to the brain, 762 00:38:23.140 --> 00:38:25.800 what it really does is change the existing balance 763 00:38:25.800 --> 00:38:27.220 of the brain's chemistry. 764 00:38:27.600 --> 00:38:31.600 Now we know that this is the case because by definition, 765 00:38:31.600 --> 00:38:35.440 if a substance has some kind of effect on the brain, 766 00:38:35.560 --> 00:38:39.260 there must be a receptor already there waiting, as it were, 767 00:38:39.380 --> 00:38:41.780 to connect with the substance that you're introducing. 768 00:38:42.060 --> 00:38:45.080 Otherwise, obviously, these substances would have no effect. 769 00:38:45.280 --> 00:38:48.640 So if they have an effect, therefore there must be 770 00:38:48.640 --> 00:38:51.000 some receptor already present. 771 00:38:51.320 --> 00:38:55.500 And we now know that there is a vast range of neurotransmitting chemicals 772 00:38:55.500 --> 00:39:00.080 already present in a nervous system that does, in effect, 773 00:39:00.260 --> 00:39:01.580 already have its own effect. 774 00:39:01.600 --> 00:39:05.020 Its own opiates, its own cocaines, its own amphetamines, 775 00:39:05.120 --> 00:39:08.200 its own hallucinogens, all of these chemicals, 776 00:39:08.240 --> 00:39:09.940 or very close relatives of them, 777 00:39:10.020 --> 00:39:13.260 are already operating in the human brain. 778 00:39:13.380 --> 00:39:17.700 That is, in effect, what the human brain is as a neurochemical system. 779 00:39:18.580 --> 00:39:22.580 One of the most striking examples of this is provided by the opiates. 780 00:39:23.180 --> 00:39:25.400 Opium is a really remarkable substance. 781 00:39:25.580 --> 00:39:27.420 Many people have said it is the drug, 782 00:39:27.600 --> 00:39:30.160 and it certainly has a great deal of claim to that. 783 00:39:31.600 --> 00:39:35.040 It was instrumental in many of these discoveries 784 00:39:35.600 --> 00:39:38.040 about the way in which the human brain works. 785 00:39:38.160 --> 00:39:40.680 And in fact, it seems that many drug users historically, 786 00:39:40.920 --> 00:39:44.380 right through the 19th century and including especially Freud, 787 00:39:44.580 --> 00:39:46.660 had a kind of intuition about this, 788 00:39:46.800 --> 00:39:49.080 that if drugs do work in the brain, 789 00:39:49.160 --> 00:39:52.360 then to some extent the brain must be a neurochemical system. 790 00:39:52.680 --> 00:39:56.200 So drugs were really instrumental in developing this line of thought. 791 00:39:57.140 --> 00:39:59.020 In the 1970s, 792 00:39:59.020 --> 00:40:03.760 when thousands of US servicemen returned to America from Vietnam 793 00:40:03.760 --> 00:40:05.340 with addictions to heroin, 794 00:40:06.020 --> 00:40:10.200 it was really that that prompted a great deal of research in this area. 795 00:40:10.360 --> 00:40:13.180 And it was then that neurochemical studies revealed 796 00:40:13.180 --> 00:40:17.740 that the brain effectively produces its own endogenous opiates, 797 00:40:17.860 --> 00:40:20.440 substances that were called endorphins. 798 00:40:20.740 --> 00:40:23.640 And these are kind of naturally present painkillers, 799 00:40:23.640 --> 00:40:26.060 produced in order to allow the body to cope 800 00:40:26.060 --> 00:40:27.980 with different kinds of stress, pain, 801 00:40:27.980 --> 00:40:29.460 or exertion. 802 00:40:29.940 --> 00:40:32.160 So the heroin user, for example, 803 00:40:32.380 --> 00:40:34.520 is adding a very similar mixture, 804 00:40:34.740 --> 00:40:35.780 a very similar substance, 805 00:40:36.080 --> 00:40:38.360 to the chemical mixture of the brain, 806 00:40:38.560 --> 00:40:41.060 effectively giving the brain the reward 807 00:40:41.060 --> 00:40:44.220 without, of course, the pre-existing pain 808 00:40:44.220 --> 00:40:48.260 that the brain would usually produce these substances in response to. 809 00:40:48.640 --> 00:40:52.280 So again, the opiates in this sense are not alien substances. 810 00:40:52.720 --> 00:40:54.400 In fact, you may be interested to know 811 00:40:54.400 --> 00:40:56.440 that it's been recently suggested 812 00:40:56.440 --> 00:40:57.960 that in mothers' milk, 813 00:40:57.980 --> 00:41:02.140 there is a relatively high dose of an opiate-like substance, 814 00:41:02.460 --> 00:41:06.400 which it's thought effectively keeps babies quiet and happy and calm 815 00:41:06.400 --> 00:41:07.800 every time they feed. 816 00:41:08.180 --> 00:41:10.660 It's one of the crucial elements of breast milk. 817 00:41:10.740 --> 00:41:13.200 So to some extent, we were all raised on this stuff anyway. 818 00:41:17.960 --> 00:41:20.020 It's also on this level, in this detail, 819 00:41:20.180 --> 00:41:23.740 of the neurochemical processes associated with the use of these substances 820 00:41:24.260 --> 00:41:25.740 that, as I said at the beginning, 821 00:41:25.900 --> 00:41:27.520 I think we can learn some lessons 822 00:41:27.980 --> 00:41:30.440 about how these substances work at other levels as well. 823 00:41:31.660 --> 00:41:34.640 The way the brain itself reacts to these substances, 824 00:41:34.880 --> 00:41:39.180 for example, often the high, the hit, the pleasure that's produced, 825 00:41:39.460 --> 00:41:44.020 comes not from the first introduction of the substance itself. 826 00:41:44.240 --> 00:41:46.900 That's not necessarily what gives you that hit. 827 00:41:47.120 --> 00:41:49.560 Often, and this is especially true with the opiates, 828 00:41:49.700 --> 00:41:53.120 the hit comes from the brain's attempt to re-establish equilibrium 829 00:41:53.120 --> 00:41:57.880 in the face of the introduction of this extra dose of a particular chemical. 830 00:41:57.980 --> 00:42:03.180 So, for example, if you insert one substance, 831 00:42:03.320 --> 00:42:06.020 often the brain cuts down on its own production 832 00:42:06.020 --> 00:42:09.060 of that particular substance in order to compensate. 833 00:42:09.420 --> 00:42:12.700 This also is thought to explain a lot of the addictive effects of drugs, 834 00:42:12.780 --> 00:42:14.960 because obviously the brain gets the message 835 00:42:14.960 --> 00:42:17.720 that it doesn't need to produce its own endorphins, 836 00:42:17.840 --> 00:42:21.900 and consequently if you then stop taking a particular substance, 837 00:42:22.080 --> 00:42:24.680 you do find yourself in pain, very literally. 838 00:42:26.320 --> 00:42:27.960 And it seems that, on a common basis, 839 00:42:27.980 --> 00:42:30.480 at a cultural level we're looking at exactly the same problem, 840 00:42:30.700 --> 00:42:34.360 that the war on drugs is again the overreaction, 841 00:42:34.480 --> 00:42:37.660 the culture's attempt to restore equilibrium 842 00:42:37.660 --> 00:42:43.060 following the introduction of these additional substances into the mixture. 843 00:42:43.280 --> 00:42:48.640 That the war on drugs again is a kind of attempt to restore the balance, 844 00:42:48.760 --> 00:42:51.040 and that's what produces many of the problems 845 00:42:51.040 --> 00:42:55.000 that we deal with in the contemporary situation with drugs. 846 00:42:55.800 --> 00:42:57.960 So these patterns, what happens when a substance 847 00:42:57.980 --> 00:43:00.460 or a psychoactive chemical is introduced into the brain, 848 00:43:00.620 --> 00:43:03.760 can it seems be observed on this global scale as well. 849 00:43:04.040 --> 00:43:05.640 It's almost like a fractal pattern. 850 00:43:05.940 --> 00:43:09.740 What happens on one level seems to reproduce itself on the global level too. 851 00:43:10.380 --> 00:43:13.520 The global economic system has historically responded 852 00:43:13.520 --> 00:43:17.760 to the introduction of psychoactives in ways which are remarkably similar 853 00:43:17.760 --> 00:43:21.460 to the processes played out in the neurochemical system. 854 00:43:21.840 --> 00:43:25.400 Again, it seems that now we've got hooked on the drugs problem, 855 00:43:25.620 --> 00:43:26.840 on the war on drugs. 856 00:43:26.840 --> 00:43:29.940 It's become a systemic part of the furniture. 857 00:43:30.060 --> 00:43:32.380 Again, we seem unable to do without it. 858 00:43:34.600 --> 00:43:38.840 And psychoactive substances have also been remarkably economically active, 859 00:43:39.620 --> 00:43:41.560 and this is a point that I'll conclude on. 860 00:43:43.120 --> 00:43:46.320 In the history of capitalism, as I mentioned with Coca-Cola, 861 00:43:46.480 --> 00:43:49.360 there's a good argument to suggest that addictive substances 862 00:43:49.360 --> 00:43:51.360 were really the first true commodities, 863 00:43:51.540 --> 00:43:53.540 the first things to really market themselves, 864 00:43:53.960 --> 00:43:56.300 to have an inbuilt kind of return order. 865 00:43:56.840 --> 00:44:00.580 They were really the first goods to discover the tricks of trade, 866 00:44:00.800 --> 00:44:04.220 how to sew up a market, how to get your buyers hooked. 867 00:44:04.680 --> 00:44:09.080 The Coca-Cola story makes it clear that if a commodity doesn't have a natural hook, 868 00:44:09.220 --> 00:44:12.980 then you need to compensate, to add value, to add the hooks, 869 00:44:13.040 --> 00:44:14.780 to find other ways to promote the commodity. 870 00:44:15.280 --> 00:44:18.760 But drugs themselves remain commodities par excellence, 871 00:44:18.920 --> 00:44:22.420 and the drugs trade, together with the war on drugs, 872 00:44:22.540 --> 00:44:25.640 are a kind of model of capitalism in the raw. 873 00:44:25.740 --> 00:44:26.820 On the one hand, they're not. 874 00:44:39.500 --> 00:44:40.060 One者者者者者者者者者 875 00:44:42.560 --> 00:44:43.240 者者者 876 00:44:43.240 --> 00:44:43.380 者者 877 00:44:43.380 --> 00:44:43.860 者者 878 00:44:44.460 --> 00:44:44.540 者 879 00:44:42.820 --> 00:44:49.180 Okay, here we have a shout, 880 00:44:44.540 --> 00:44:49.880 surrounding drugs as the most restrictive international laws and again the first international 881 00:44:49.880 --> 00:44:56.680 laws and the first attempts to control all levels of a commodity. And these two poles really mark 882 00:44:56.680 --> 00:45:02.840 the parameters of modern capitalism. It's almost as though the drugs trade and attempts to control 883 00:45:02.840 --> 00:45:12.300 it are like a kind of model really of the extreme parameters of modern capitalism. And of course 884 00:45:12.300 --> 00:45:18.900 each tends to excite the other so the two poles become more and more extreme. Now probably after 885 00:45:18.900 --> 00:45:23.340 many of the discussions that we've had in the last couple of days it's become very clear that 886 00:45:23.340 --> 00:45:29.360 prohibition over the last hundred years has directly contributed to the scale of the drugs trade 887 00:45:29.360 --> 00:45:36.580 and to many and in fact you know plays an enormous role in the whole shape now of international 888 00:45:36.580 --> 00:45:42.040 economic system. And any significant changes to that situation to international 889 00:45:42.040 --> 00:45:42.280 economic system will have to be made. And I think that's what we're going to see. 890 00:46:00.040 --> 00:46:11.820 I think that's what we're going to see. And I think that's what we're going to see. 891 00:46:11.820 --> 00:46:41.580 I think that's what we're going to see. 892 00:46:41.580 --> 00:46:50.120 I think that's what we're going to see. 893 00:47:13.900 --> 00:47:15.940 Okay, thank you very much. 894 00:47:33.120 --> 00:47:35.880 We have two microphones in the hall, 895 00:47:36.100 --> 00:47:41.560 one right in the center here, for people who want to ask questions, 896 00:47:41.580 --> 00:47:47.880 questions and I think there's one in the back. Is that at the top? Is that true? If not, 897 00:47:48.020 --> 00:47:53.380 then please come downstairs to this one. We have a few minutes before the session ends 898 00:47:53.380 --> 00:47:55.920 and please. 899 00:47:57.100 --> 00:48:02.320 Hi. Thanks, Sadie. I thought it was a really great talk. At the beginning, you made a comment 900 00:48:02.320 --> 00:48:09.980 about drugs as a form of control, particularly the opium market and so forth. Ginsburg, Leary 901 00:48:09.980 --> 00:48:14.800 and Lennon have also made a similar comment about LSD in one of the classic conspiracy 902 00:48:14.800 --> 00:48:20.760 theories whereby LSD was developed by the CIA to help zonk people out because it wasn't 903 00:48:20.760 --> 00:48:27.160 able to be used as a universal truth serum. I'd just like to wonder if Sadie would be 904 00:48:27.160 --> 00:48:32.640 prepared to make a few comments about some of the other drugs like coffee, tobacco and 905 00:48:32.640 --> 00:48:38.060 alcohol and maybe some of their relations to how they help to control society since 906 00:48:38.060 --> 00:48:38.940 they are not prohibited. 907 00:48:39.980 --> 00:48:45.180 And just as I mentioned on alcohol, because we've talked about coal-origin opium, alcohol 908 00:48:45.180 --> 00:48:50.180 has also been a great provider, stimulus. There's people like Francis Bacon, the painter, 909 00:48:50.340 --> 00:48:54.400 who's one of the most original painters still of this century in my opinion, and James Joyce, 910 00:48:54.560 --> 00:49:00.080 who is still ahead of his time in the 21st century. Both of them got their main inspiration 911 00:49:00.080 --> 00:49:06.160 from alcohol, which is considered to be obviously quite dangerous. But yes, some comments on 912 00:49:06.160 --> 00:49:07.600 some of the other drugs would be great. Thanks. 913 00:49:07.780 --> 00:49:09.960 Okay. Well, you're absolutely right. 914 00:49:09.980 --> 00:49:16.160 I mean, alcohol probably has had an equal, if not more, incisive influence historically, 915 00:49:16.700 --> 00:49:22.320 well, and in the present, obviously, on writers, artists. And again, you could very easily, 916 00:49:22.460 --> 00:49:26.100 and it would be a wonderful piece of research probably for somebody else to do, not me, 917 00:49:26.200 --> 00:49:34.920 but to really tease out how directly this influence can be traced in particular cases 918 00:49:34.920 --> 00:49:39.960 and with particular people. And in fact, many writers, such as the people I didn't mention, 919 00:49:39.960 --> 00:49:44.880 like Edgar Allan Poe, were both great opium users and great alcohol users. So, you know, 920 00:49:44.900 --> 00:49:49.940 obviously, it's a very arbitrary line in one way to just consider drugs in one sense and 921 00:49:49.940 --> 00:49:56.780 not to consider alcohol. But first of all, I think it is, I mean, I think it is important 922 00:49:56.780 --> 00:50:02.540 to begin, I mean, I suppose I try to begin with the list of scheduled substances and 923 00:50:02.540 --> 00:50:07.180 say, okay, you know, let's take that list and see, you know, what is it about that list 924 00:50:07.180 --> 00:50:09.940 that is so special? And to, you know, clearly that is what we're talking about. And so, 925 00:50:09.960 --> 00:50:12.560 I think it is important to begin with the list of scheduled substances and to really 926 00:50:12.560 --> 00:50:17.420 try and bring that out. And I think there are actually some quite crucial differences 927 00:50:17.420 --> 00:50:22.720 between alcohol and nearly all the other substances, especially if you bear in mind some of these 928 00:50:22.720 --> 00:50:28.900 ideas about neurochemistry. Most of these other substances do have a very direct relationship 929 00:50:28.900 --> 00:50:34.000 to particular receptors in the brain and to particular processes in the brain. Alcohol 930 00:50:34.520 --> 00:50:39.940 tends to flood the brain with many, many different chemical effects. You know, it can cause a 931 00:50:39.940 --> 00:50:42.760 lot of different things. You know, you can have a lot of different experiences with alcohol. 932 00:50:43.680 --> 00:50:49.380 Obviously, it can produce highs and lows and a whole multitude of in-betweens. And, you 933 00:50:49.380 --> 00:50:54.000 know, in many senses, it is a qualitatively different kind of substance. And this, you 934 00:50:54.000 --> 00:50:58.020 know, I wonder if on some level this does account for its different treatment as well 935 00:50:58.020 --> 00:51:02.880 historically in a social context. It also seems, and this was mentioned in one of the 936 00:51:02.880 --> 00:51:09.920 debates last night, that alcohol is, you know, obviously it has in the West, you know, a 937 00:51:09.940 --> 00:51:15.920 very specific role in the society. You know, alcohol is associated with the religious 938 00:51:18.860 --> 00:51:24.260 sense in which alcohol is associated. But also, that gives rise to a broader sense of 939 00:51:24.260 --> 00:51:28.360 communion where alcohol is often considered to be the kind of, you know, liquid that really 940 00:51:28.900 --> 00:51:35.660 allows a certain kind of sociality to happen. It allows social communion to happen, if you 941 00:51:35.660 --> 00:51:39.920 like. And I think that has often been quite, you know, 942 00:51:39.920 --> 00:51:46.040 very much encouraged by, well, implicitly, tacitly encouraged, if you like, by the powers that be, 943 00:51:46.180 --> 00:51:48.700 because it is seen to help society along. 944 00:51:49.120 --> 00:51:59.400 The thing with many psychoactive substances is that they have tended to often be seen to subvert a lot of the social interactions. 945 00:52:00.680 --> 00:52:06.540 The opium user was very much regarded as somebody sitting on their own, in their own world, 946 00:52:06.660 --> 00:52:08.240 locked away from the rest of society. 947 00:52:08.240 --> 00:52:11.900 That was considered to be slightly dangerous and frightening and unknown. 948 00:52:13.220 --> 00:52:18.420 So there are some very interesting qualitative differences, but I absolutely agree with you, obviously. 949 00:52:18.560 --> 00:52:24.180 In terms of influence on our broader culture, then alcohol has had a profound influence. 950 00:52:24.480 --> 00:52:28.140 I'm sorry, I've only answered one part of your question, I know, but yeah. 951 00:52:28.680 --> 00:52:31.680 One more question, then we should close. 952 00:52:31.940 --> 00:52:37.980 Yes, look, the weapons, two weapons not used by the drug reformers, 953 00:52:38.240 --> 00:52:41.080 and you're coming to it, is the fact that the opiates are non-toxic, 954 00:52:41.120 --> 00:52:45.380 and this seems to be because the body produces continuously and slowly its own opiates. 955 00:52:45.820 --> 00:52:46.540 That's one thing. 956 00:52:46.580 --> 00:52:51.480 That's the chief weapon you should use against the drug prohibitionists that's not being used. 957 00:52:51.920 --> 00:52:53.720 Well, I think it is being used now, isn't it? 958 00:52:53.840 --> 00:52:56.300 I mean, hopefully we're using it right now as a weapon. 959 00:52:56.600 --> 00:53:02.740 Yeah, well, I mean, last night I tried to get Nicholas to admit that the law was a liar 960 00:53:03.460 --> 00:53:06.800 and equip people on the fact that the law is a liar, and he won't do that. 961 00:53:07.060 --> 00:53:08.220 The other weapon is... 962 00:53:08.240 --> 00:53:11.800 The other weapon is that the drug prohibition has got nothing to do with pharmacological harm. 963 00:53:11.860 --> 00:53:13.460 It's entirely religious and racial. 964 00:53:14.020 --> 00:53:17.740 The religious doctrine of redemptive suffering, as David Myers says, 965 00:53:17.860 --> 00:53:20.620 religion is the enemy of freedom and pleasure. 966 00:53:20.920 --> 00:53:23.320 And this is not being used by the reformers. 967 00:53:23.420 --> 00:53:27.160 You see, you really get stuck into the real basic cause of why we've got drug prohibition. 968 00:53:27.260 --> 00:53:30.060 It's not pharmacological, it's religious wowserism. 969 00:53:30.260 --> 00:53:32.300 Yeah, I agree with you. 970 00:53:32.360 --> 00:53:38.080 I agree with you, and as you can tell from my talk, 971 00:53:38.240 --> 00:53:41.560 I'm a great one also in looking back to some of the original causes. 972 00:53:41.760 --> 00:53:48.360 But I think the thing is that now the whole drug prohibition kind of system, 973 00:53:48.620 --> 00:53:50.240 it has become like a system. 974 00:53:50.380 --> 00:53:52.800 It's become this kind of self-perpetuating thing, 975 00:53:52.940 --> 00:53:56.280 which has probably lost sight of its own origins as well. 976 00:53:56.640 --> 00:54:01.460 And this is now, I think, the problem that we have to cut through, 977 00:54:01.540 --> 00:54:06.520 that the whole thing has developed its own bizarre logic that we need to counter. 978 00:54:06.660 --> 00:54:08.100 And we need to use all the arguments. 979 00:54:08.240 --> 00:54:11.520 And I agree, your arguments are a vital part of that. 980 00:54:11.880 --> 00:54:15.260 The next session that is scheduled in this hall, 981 00:54:15.620 --> 00:54:18.480 which is women and substance misuse, 982 00:54:18.580 --> 00:54:23.560 and is a continuation of a lot of things we're talking about in a feminist context, 983 00:54:24.300 --> 00:54:26.700 has been rescheduled and will not be here, 984 00:54:26.820 --> 00:54:29.940 but is in fact occurring in Brookman Hall over here. 985 00:54:30.040 --> 00:54:31.860 So if you want to follow that next panel, 986 00:54:31.940 --> 00:54:36.000 which with Fran Baum, Charlotte Ducrepini, and Virginia McGowan, 987 00:54:36.120 --> 00:54:38.220 that is going to be in Brookman Hall, 988 00:54:38.240 --> 00:54:39.600 starting in 15 minutes. 989 00:54:39.780 --> 00:54:42.040 And please may we thank Sadie Plante. 990 00:54:42.220 --> 00:54:42.920 Thank you. 991 00:54:43.260 --> 00:54:44.060 Thank you. 992 00:54:44.440 --> 00:54:45.060 Thank you. 993 00:54:45.060 --> 00:54:49.340 Thank you.